Wednesday, October 26, 2011

It goes
without saying that our most recent alt avatar contest was a massive
success. We had hoped the community would answer the call and were
delighted to see so many passionate HoN players that wanted to see
their own work make it into the game. There were so many suggestions in
fact that after much deliberation, screaming, and trash talking in the
office, we almost couldn't come to a consensus over who would make the
cut and who would live to fight another day on the hero concept
battlefield.

In the end however, we had to
condense thousands of submissions into a mere 5 for voting purposes.
There were plenty of great ideas, including a few that we had already
been working on internally for months. Keep in mind that just because
you don't see your idea in the running to win, that doesn't mean you
wont see it in the game in the near future.

As of this post the voting
will commence and continue until November 9, so show your fellow
community members some love and cast your vote.

And btw, to those of you who
took this contest seriously and submitted your own original concept,
artwork, and backstory, your work did not go unnoticed, so don’t get
discouraged. In the end we read through EVERYTHING and enjoyed every
minute of it.

Thanks again to all who have participated thus far, now LET’S GET IT ON!

Thursday, October 20, 2011

I have seen a few threads asking about the Spotlight video and the hero
for this week. I would like to clarify by saying we will not be
releasing a hero until next Friday (October 28th). After careful
consideration, we have decided to slightly slow down the release of
heroes, based on the input of our community. We have seen requests from
both our competitive players and public players to scale back our hero
production and have decided that this would be a positive move for the
game. The increased duration between releases will allow players to
adjust to the changes before another new hero is added.

You can continue to count on weekly updates and increased efforts to
improve the game through balance patches, well-designed and tested
heroes, and new items.

We appreciate all of the comments from the community and are anxious to keep improving the game we all love.

To tide you over until his Hero Spotlight, here's your first look at the upcoming form-changing wolf hero!

On October 21st at 2:30AM EST (6:30AM GMT) we will be taking some of our
systems offline to perform some required maintenance on them. During
this time the Chat Server, Login Server, Database and other HoN services
may or may not be functional so connectivity will be limited. We
anticipate this maintenance will take up to three hours. We will update
this post with periodic updates in case of any delays. Thanks in
advance for your patience.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Whenever S2Games releases a new Hero,
the Community is skeptic to say the least. This isn't a new phenomenon,
and can be viewed empirically by quickly glancing at YouTube or Forum
posts left by disgruntled members of the Community when the Hero is
first announced. When this first started happening, I was somewhat
confused, because it seemed like no matter what Hero came out, no matter
what skills or weaknesses it possessed, it would be quickly dismissed
as the newest overpowered garbage to grace the game.

If you
read my last article, you might be scratching your head asking yourself
if you are about to read the same article twice- but there is a distinct
difference here. A hero like Emerald Warden or Tremble didn't just
carry the illusion of lower-bracket chaos, they literally delivered it.
No matter what the highest tier competitive player says, these Heroes
dominated the lower game brackets and left players frustrated. Players
who claimed they saw this coming a mile away were quick to remind
everybody that "they told you so".